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/ BARAK / 54

Chapter Twenty-One

President Clinton and I met the next morning. My aim was to persuade him that
the time had come for a make-or-break summit with Yasir Arafat.

I suspected it would not be easy to convince him, and it wasn’t. But I made the
argument that if we were to have any hope of moving Oslo forward, we now faced
a stark choice. We were three years behind the timeline for starting work on a
“permanent status” agreement, and only six months from an American election that
would choose President Clinton’s successor. We could, of course, pursue the Oslo
process along its current, meandering path. But even though Bibi had slowed it
down, that would inevitably mean Israel handing back yet more West Bank land to
Arafat – in return for familiar, but still unfulfilled and untested, verbal assurances
that he wanted peace. Each successive Israeli withdrawal reduced his incentive to
engage of the core issues like final borders, refugees, or Jerusalem. I could not in
good conscience justify that, either to myself or my country. The second option
was the summit. I realized there was no guarantee it would succeed. But it would
finally force Arafat to negotiate on the core issues – before the departure of an
American President who had a grasp of the all issues and characters involved, and
a personal commitment to converting the promise of Oslo into a genuine peace.

The obvious political risk, for both Clinton and me, was that after convening a
summit – with all the heightened expectations and pressures it would bring – we’d
fail to get an agreement. Though I’d be more directly affected, however, it was a
more straightforward choice for me. In part because I’d been in front-line politics
so briefly, but mostly because of what I’d done for the three-and-a-half decades
before then, I viewed the political risk as just one of many, and by no means the
most important. That was an obvious weakness in me as a traditional politician. I
would indeed pay a political price later on for having given too little heed, and
perhaps underestimated, the reaction in Israel to the summit and what came after it.
Yet as I tried to impress on President Clinton, there were risks in not holding a
summit as well, along with the obvious reward of a full and final peace if it
succeeded. If it failed? At least we would know a peace agreement with Arafat was
impossible. In fact, amid the diplomatic drift since Oslo, it was clear there was no
other way that we could know.

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